American reckoning

American reckoning is an engaged book, and all the more powerful for it. In its closing paragraph Christian Appy asserts: ‘But the public is not blameless’. If Americans continue to believe in their exceptionalism, to acquiesce in the misuse of US power so evident over the past decade and a half, if they trust that US force is being used for good, the likelihood that US intervention and militarism will continue is ‘guaranteed’. He concludes: ‘Perhaps the only basis to begin real change is to seek the fuller reckoning of our role in the world that the Vietnam War so powerfully awakened—to confront the evidence of what we have done. It is our record; it is who we are’ (p. 335). American reckoning is a sustained reflection on US culture, society, politics and foreign policy during and after the Vietnam War. By weaving together a disparate array of sources from the official to the cultural, including books, films, television, cultural exchanges and political discourse, Appy demonstrates how, despite the ongoing wars and an abundance of other evidence on display, there is still an inclination to believe in the United States as a benevolent power, deploying force reluctantly in the service of good and for promoting democracy or liberty. Yet these ideas were sorely tested over the Vietnam War. Appy conclusively argues that while cultural interactions keep re-centring US identity on traditional assumptions, presidents, principals and congressional members continue to engage in and support activities that ought to call that central identity into question. In that sense, American reckoning fits within a line of books from the revisionists of the 1950s through to the work of Michael Sherry, and more recently Andrew Bacevich, John Dower, Nick Turse, Patrick Hagopian and many others who not only deal with the question of US identity, militarism and foreign policy, but also wonder when a ‘reckoning’ will take place. Despite all the disparate ways in which the Vietnam War and its legacy remain pertinent and present in the decades after 1975, the United States has implicitly refused to deal with its most profound questions on exceptionalism, identity and particularly accountability

Aesthetics · Democracy · Identity (music · Militarism · National identity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Vietnam War · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies